The Children’s Block

by Otto B Kraus

  ‘Close your eyes,’ said Alex Ehren, ‘and dream that one day you’ll have as many apples as you wish … a basket, a barrel and a cart.’

  The children chewed the bit of fruit and dreamt about the world.

  The puppets made Fabian even more popular than his ‘Alouette’. They asked him to roll his r’s and rattle his g’s and speak like the Devil, which he did with relish and gusto. He sang ‘Alouette’ with them and made them laugh with his fibs, but in the evening when the children left, he mocked himself and his friends who dreamt about Palestine, and memorised Hebrew words.

  ‘Aren’t we funny,’ he sneered, ‘with one foot in the grave and with the other in a kibbutz in Palestine.’

  The Block instructors looked like scarecrows in their rags marked with red paint, their shaven heads covered with knitted caps, shuffling along in their wooden clogs. The men were unshaven, the women gaunt. Their coats were either too short or trailing on the ground. They knew that they would die on the 20th of June, but they remained committed, making the children wash in icy water and write words and sentences in straight lines.

  Alex Ehren wrote little plays for the puppet theatre and Beran collected poems on scraps of paper. But their inspiration was often tinsel, and their convictions false.

  Alex Ehren preached one thing but believed in another, and Fabian’s mockery kept him down to earth. It helped him to see himself as he was – an ordinary man, a number, a scarecrow and not a very good teacher. They all – Beran and Himmelblau and even Marta Felix – needed Fabian, whose crooked mirror provided them with true proportion and kept them sane and sober.

  Fabian was an artist at eating his soup. He started out holding his bowl in both hands. He closed his eyes, felt its warmth and inhaled the fragrance of the potatoes, the beet and bone, which the cooks sometimes threw into the cauldron. His spectacles had only one sound lens and he had to crane his head like a raptor to see his dish. In the process of cooking the soup had disintegrated into grey mush. Yet sometimes, on a lucky day, when the ladle came from the bottom of the barrel, he struck a piece of potato or a slice of beet, which he saved for the very end of his meal. He held his spoon as delicately as if it were a musical instrument, a flute, an oboe or a horn, on which he was about to produce a theme. He scooped the top crust and licked his spoon with his tongue as if it were the cheek of his beloved. He sank his lip into the liquid pool and sipped the soup but didn’t swallow and held it against his palate, savouring its ingredients, and only then allowed the food to flow down his throat. Each time he swallowed he did so with remorse, knowing that what was gone could never be recovered. He worked slowly along the banks of the bowl, sometimes leaving a mound in the centre, yet at other times he ventured right into the deep and sailed stately towards the shores. His meal took him a long time, longer than anybody else, and often when the children returned from the washroom with their cleaned bowls, Fabian was still at the last remnants of his soup.

  He sighed and tied the bowl to his trousers.

  ‘Eating,’ he said, ‘is like making love: either you put your heart and your groin into it, or you don’t do it at all.’

  He was small and twisted like a mountain tree and hungrier than other instructors. Sometimes when Lisa Pomnenka got bread from the German doctor, she broke off a piece and gave it to Fabian. He was gruff in his thanks and hid the bread in his jacket.

  ‘Much obliged, my princess,’ he said satanically. ‘Ask the doctor if he doesn’t need an actor.’ He was aware of her likeness to the puppet and sometimes, as if by mistake, he addressed her as Princess Marmalade.

  And so each one had a dream. They lived terribly and without a shield against death. They were exposed to cold, starvation, to the ever-present stench of decay, the festering canker of their wounds and the bittersweet smoke of the burnt offerings, which rolled in wreaths over the landscape. It was a borderline existence, devoid of light and murky as if living under water. Their life had no value and even the trivial matters were like climbing a mountain.

  Alex Ehren washed, waited in a queue for his pittance of bread and beetroot jam, and each day he felt lucky that he hadn’t contracted diarrhoea, which caused dehydration and sudden soiled death. He lived with the children and taught them a bit of reading and writing and a little about the world they had never seen, but each task was like swimming against the stream. Yet he knew that as long as he fought he was alive and could indulge in his secret dreams.

  He kept his world of dreams to himself and didn’t share it even with Lisa Pomnenka, whom he loved. He had an ability, which he had developed at school, where during boring chemistry lessons he learned to conjure up white towns and landscapes with exotic trees. It was an exquisite gift, which he used sparingly on sleepless nights. He knew that the panacea of his dreams was only a temporary freedom, which would disperse like mist in the morning, but even that was a remedy and a relief.

  One evening he had a vision that came to him uncalled for and of its own. He was in the hollow of a rock. It was a secret cave, a womb sealed off by layers of lava hardened into basalt. It was so deep within himself that there were no words, nor light, nor air and, as it was utterly self-contained, he was detached from his outer self. He was not alone but shared the cave with a pride of animals. They emerged from dark pools and sprouted like mushrooms, in the soil of his desires, some of them corporeal and others inchoate, shadowy and vague. They prowled the forests of his soul and tried to lead him astray.

  Yet then the beasts were gone and he was alone. And from there, from the constriction of the chiselled cave, he cried out upwards, like a tree. At first he was shy because he had never been a religious person and didn’t know the words of any prayer, but then he understood that reaching upwards didn’t require words or religion, and he wasn’t shy any more. He was scared that his voice wouldn’t pierce the rock, the distance and the unknowing clouds, and he raised his voice to a shriek. He didn’t mind whether there was anybody who listened or loved or cared, because what mattered was the striving, which was like water for his very self, parched with fears.

  And then there was an answer. It didn’t come in a flash of light or the raising of a curtain or from any direction, but grew like a flower or a crystal from within and spread outwards. He suddenly understood, unwillingly and reluctantly, and with a great deal of resentment, that the camps were not what they seemed to be, but a part of a whole. Life was an immense gift, a miracle of miracles, exquisite and unique and bestowed only once. His ordeal, his degradation, and even the children who were condemned to die before their time, weren’t for nothing; the children hadn’t been born in vain and did matter terribly, because by having existed they made an imprint in the dust of the universe. It was therefore of utmost importance how they used their gift of life, because each thought, each word, each deed and even the breath from their mouths would be indelibly imbedded in the abyss of time to come. He was an outcome of all that had ever been and the beginning of everything that would ever be, and thus he could never be abandoned or forgotten. His life, like that of any man, tree or rock, was a link in the chain and thus of instrumental, infinite and cosmic importance.

  He became aware that there were other worlds beyond his world, worlds that moved in circles within circles, intertwining, separating, growing and dying into nothingness, out of which new stars were born. He knew, though not in his mind but from somewhere within, that there were other lives beyond his life, lives that occurred on planes of consciousness different from his. They were transient and subject to the chaos of dying, though all of them – the formed and the formless and those yet to be formed – were part of the whole.

  The revelation was simple and self-evident and Alex Ehren wondered why he hadn’t stumbled on the truth before. After some time the experience waned and lost its sharp outlines but it stayed with him like a flash of light in darkness, as long as he lived.

  However, most of the time he dreamt about food. His life was stripped of pretence and he had little need for
religion or the transcendental. There were some inmates, like Dezo Kovac, who occasionally joined a group of old men, who, in the darkness of early morning, swayed backwards and forwards and mumbled words of prayers which they barely understood. Their prayer was a longing for things past rather than piety, because it was difficult to praise God in a place devoid of human dignity.

  There was a boy in Beran’s group who had a Bible. It was a small volume in black covers, which Aryeh had rescued through the showers and the tattooing ordeal. The book was printed in Hebrew with a Czech translation on facing pages, and the teachers borrowed it from time to time and read a chapter about the kings and wars and the creation of the world to the older children.

  Many of the instructors were members of the Zionist movement, who intended to emigrate to Palestine when the war ended. Sometimes they argued whether to travel directly from Birkenau to join a kibbutz or stop for some time in Prague. They had little knowledge of the climate, the work and the language, although some of them could form a number of twisted Hebrew sentences.

  What they didn’t know they substituted by imagination, and Alex Ehren played a game with the children called ‘When I come to Palestine, I’ll see a lemon tree’. It was a memory game where each child added an item until there was a string of objects they would see in Palestine. The one that couldn’t remember the proper order of words had to quit. It was a good game but less useful than a drill called ‘What I will do when an SS comes in’.

  ‘We’ll play a game, we’ll play a game,’ they shouted and the one who forgot to shout lost a point. Alex Ehren often sprang the question on the children but they knew the trick, and by the end only Majda, who was a dreamer and sucked her thumb, lost a point.

  Aryeh was thin and serious and the only child that spoke Hebrew. He was the son of Miriam, the matron, and Edelstein, who had been the Ghetto Elder. When Eichmann visited the Children’s Block, he took Aunt Miriam’s letter, but was evasive about a possible visit.

  ‘It’s not in my hands,’ he said, ‘but I’ll see what I can do.’

  He was lying, of course, as all the Germans were when they spoke to the prisoners. The Jewish prisoners were kept in the dark to prevent them from planning an escape. The Germans always altered their regulations, and what was permitted one day was prohibited by the next morning. Since Pestek’s escape they even rotated the SS sentries lest they became friendly with an inmate.

  There were rumours about a Jewish uprising in Warsaw, and Mietek swore that he had spoken to a man who had escaped through the sewers of the burning ghetto. The man had lived for some time in a village but was caught and sent to Birkenau. There were other rumours about resistance in Treblinka and Sobibór and Majdanek, names Alex Ehren had never heard before, but the rumours came and went and nobody knew whether they were true or false. The Family Camp was like a house without windows and the prisoners were isolated, not only from the events in the world but also from other compounds in Auschwitz. Most of them worked inside the camp, and when a commando was marched to a working place beyond the gate, the sentries kept them apart from labourers from other places.

  Some of the prisoners, like Hynek Rind, who called himself a Czech of Jewish descent, saw in it a good omen.

  ‘Even the Germans know that we are different from the Polish Jews. One day they will set us free, exchange us for prisoners of war or for money. They don’t want us to mix with the rabble and learn about the chimney.’

  There was no logic in what he said because the truth filtered in with a craftsman, the Cart Commando and even with a German sentry. Everybody knew about the executions that went on daily in the gas chambers, about the occasional escapes, about the war that raged all over the world and even about the events in the German garrison.

  On Mondays they played charades. They staged Julius Caesar, Napoleon at Waterloo and Diogenes in his barrel. There was Moses and Forefather Czech, and Fabian even impersonated Adolf Hitler, whose name they pronounced with fear and trepidation. It was a dangerous idea and Himmelblau stationed Bass, the oven boy, as an additional guard at the back door, to look out for the Priest.

  Alex Ehren wondered how the children solved the riddles, because many of them had never attended school and their knowledge was shallow and full of holes. Yet they were keen on new things and intent on stories that substituted for their unlived experience. It was the Block, he thought, that replaced their twice-removed world. They were confined to the camp, but within the Children’s Block they grew like plants in a glass house, on the words of the stories and on Lisa Pomnenka’s meadow and birds on the painted wall.

  In the last weeks the girl worked almost every day for Doctor Mengele. She charted family trees, drew diagrams and sketched the faces and limbs of his human specimens. Sometimes she was frightened by the cold fury with which he compiled statistics, as if a hundred examples were not enough to prove his point. He wasn’t unkind to her and gave her bread but he flew into a rage at her smallest mistake, tore the sheets of paper to pieces and made her sit all night to repair the damage. There was something insane, she thought, in the doctor’s obsession with bone structures, shapes of the heads and blemishes of the skin. Sometimes he didn’t call her for a number of days as if he had forgotten her, but then she was summoned post-haste to draw a portrait or work with coloured inks on a diagram or sketch a family tree that spread over time and countries.

  Alex Ehren suffered when Lisa Pomnenka was away and waited for her with longing and anxiety. He thought about the strange operations the doctor performed on women, the dangers of the Gypsy Camp and the SS sentries with their German shepherds. He had never been outside the Family Camp, which in spite of its stench and starvation became a familiar place, almost a home, compared to the wilderness beyond the gate. He was glad when he saw the girl return and he left the children and hurried to touch her hand.

  Sometimes she crossed the camp road and visited the seamstress. It seemed to him a strange friendship because the seamstress was a middle-aged woman, a former Spanish war veteran, and he wondered what the two women might have in common.

  ‘Is she more important than our love?’ He was both angry and relieved that she had returned.

  ‘Of course she isn’t,’ the girl said, ‘but love has nothing to do with my visits to the Clothes Storeroom. I love you but you do not own me.’

  He was cross but after a day he made up with Lisa Pomnenka because he couldn’t bear being without her. In a peculiar way their relationship reversed and she became the stronger of the two.

  He grew more involved each day but the more ardent he became the more distant the girl was, as if she were reluctant to give herself entirely. Alex Ehren felt that she was hiding something but he didn’t know what it was. He grew jealous of Shashek, who assisted her with her painting, of the SS doctor who often kept her in his office overnight and of the seamstress, with whom she spent the hours, which he felt belonged to him.

  The seamstress might have an ultimate intention with Lisa Pomnenka, he thought; a scheme possibly connected with her work for the German doctor.

  ‘What does the woman want from you?’ he asked, irritated, but she was evasive and laughed his question away.

  ‘Women talk,’ she said. ‘She gives me material for my handicraft lessons.’

  The ordinary prisoners were not allowed to enter the Clothes Storeroom. There were two sections in the block, one serving as storage for the prisoners’ rags and the other, separated by a wooden partition, containing clothes looted from the newly arrived transports – articles that were sorted, packed and sent to Germany.

  Clothes Capo Pavel Hock kept the rags on shelves, each kind in a separate heap – worn coats, trousers too long or too short to wear and tangled piles of shoes. Some of them were pathetic, decorated with mouldering fur and others still carrying a memory of elegance, though all of them were old and shabby from wear. They were marked with red paint, the trousers on the leg and the coats on the back.

  Once a week they sent a bale of ra
gs to be washed and when they came back, grey and crumpled and smelling of carbolic acid, they occasionally found a good shirt or a pair of leather shoes, which the Clothes Capo sold for bread or soup.

  ‘It’s not me who steals the bread,’ he said, plagued by a bad conscience. ‘If you live among wolves you cannot be a sheep.’

  He was a political prisoner, a German Social Democrat, and not yet entirely depraved by camp life.

  There was a cubicle to the left of the entrance and another to the right. One belonged to the Capo with the red triangle of a political convict on his tunic and in the other the seamstress mended prisoners’ clothes, putting a patch over a patch on the torn elbows and knees. She worked on a sewing machine that Pavel Hoch repaired and oiled, but which was so ancient that a day or two later it would break down again. It still had the name and transport number of the original owner and he thought how difficult it must have been for him to carry the machine on the train. He remembered the crowded compartment, the overflowing bucket and the children who sat on the luggage in the corner. The owner of the sewing machine, he thought, might have been among the bodies he had seen along the bloodied path in the snow.

  The children were always short of clothing. The boys tore their trousers, forgot their undershirts in the washroom and often sold an item for a piece of bread. There was hardly a week when Alex Ehren didn’t have to take Bubenik or Neugeboren, or one of the girls, to the Clothes Storeroom to beg for an article of clothing. He was not allowed to enter, but had to negotiate his deal like a beggar through the half-open door. Sometimes, however, when the Clothes Capo was away, Pavel Hoch let him in and they talked, perching on a pile of old blankets.

  At one such visit Alex Ehren saw the girl. They were on the uppermost bunk in order to hide from the foreman and Lisa Pomnenka was unaware of their presence.